That's a great backup method, which is cheap and easy to recover. It's not very ...

pyre · on July 29, 2014

The 'different region' requirement might just depend on different things:

- How far away are your office and home?

- What is your locality?

As an example, I don't live in a place prone to earthquakes or hurricanes, and my office is a 20 ~ 30 min drive from my home. What is the risk that both my office and home are destroyed?

kngspook · on July 29, 2014

It's all just a matter of risk management:

- Simply copying your data to a second hard drive in the same machine protects against hard drive failure.

- Second disconnected hard drive protects you from ransom-viruses and accidental erasures.

- Second disconnected hard drive on the other side of the house gives you some protection from a fire (caught early enough).

- Second disconnected hard drive in another building some distance away protects against small disasters (eg. randomly directed tornado).

- Second disconnected hard drive in another region protects against large disasters (eg. single nuclear strike).

- Second disconnected hard drive in another country protects against national disasters (eg. invasion, multiple nuclear strikes).

- Second disconnected hard drive on another continent protects against major disasters (eg. moderate asteroid impact event)

...and so on. But all of these can be protected against by simply having 3 backups.

Except bit rot. That shit's inevitable.

pyre · on July 30, 2014

> - Second disconnected hard drive in another region protects against large disasters (eg. single nuclear strike).

> - Second disconnected hard drive in another country protects against national disasters (eg. invasion, multiple nuclear strikes).

> - Second disconnected hard drive on another continent protects against major disasters (eg. moderate asteroid impact event)

I'm not really sure if worrying about my hard drive will be something high on the priority list in many of these events.

dublinben · on July 29, 2014

If Toronto is hit by a devastating flood or winter storm, I think it's entirely likely that both your office and home could be impacted. That isn't nearly enough geographic separation to be disaster-ready. You really want to be on different coasts or continents.